5 Tips for Dealing with IT Trendiness

It’s pretty obvious that the sometimes logical, sometimes messy tech industry is veering from a trajectory many thought it would never leave. Cloud, BYOD, DevOps, Social Computing—you’ve heard the clichés associated with trends, and you’ve watched the hyperbole explode.

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But Jim Lundy, CEO of Aragon Research, spoke on trends at IT/Dev Connections 2014, and his SharePoint keynote talk was understated and pragmatic. He reported what he sees and suggested some actions.

We distilled these five tips from his talk. Our takeaway? Change is coming: You can deal with it.

Tip 1: Establish and enforce content federation standards.

“CMIS is a way to get a handle on controlling everything,” Lundy says. Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) is an open standard that lets different content management systems inter-operate over the Internet, per Wikipedia. EMC, Microsoft, OpenText—a lot of players support CMIS. “If you won’t support CMIS bi-directionally, you’re out.”

Tip 2: Leverage external collaboration.

You don’t have to do email, especially with millennials who prefer other means such as texting or Yammer. And it’s good to remember that it’s not your employees but your customers you need to engage.

Tip 3: Put machine learning to work.

“I would get in on the public beta of the Azure Machine Learning Service,” Lundy says. And for good measure, “make your apps smart and mobilize SharePoint with other services.”

Tip 4: Automate paper processes.

Digital Transaction management (DTM), a phrase you might not have seen—yet—is something Lundy and Aragon Research see growing to be a 30 billion dollar market by 2020. DTM speeds up content processing, with e-signature technology as the enabler.

Tip 5: Become mobile first.

Compress business processes into apps—“Have a mobile app jam--you sit down with your business people and say ‘We are going to design the next-gen business experience’ and make it a mobile app,” Lundy says.

And be quick to innovate. “Don’t wait to develop new apps that help the business move faster. Don’t wait for your suppliers to come up with some app. It’s about speed.”

Speaking of….what would you suppose is the number-one thing your business users want?

Well, it’s certainly not infrastructure, Lundy says. That word has likely never crossed their lips.

No, what they want is speed. “Your business people are under a lot of pressure to make decisions fast. You can be a hero and help them.”

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